Re: Credit card number checker?

On Mon, 16 Jul 2001, Christopher Ostmo wrote: > John Donagher pressed the little lettered thingies in this order... > > > My suggestion is to run an authorization for an extremely small amount of > > money ($1.00 is fairly standard) and that will tell you if the account is > > valid or not. Doing validation yourself implies a fully-publicly-understood > > Maybe I am the only one, but I would NEVER do business with ANY > company that charged my credit card just to see if it was valid. > Note, I said authorization, not charge. An authorization is a form of sale which is really a two-step process. The authorization places a hold on the funds, and then a capture transaction is initiated which indicates that the funds should be transferred. Running an authorization is harmless because (in this case) it is never captured. The only ill-effect is that your credit limit is reduced by $1.00 until the authorization expires (around a month or so). This is an accepted practice. > At any rate, the initial request was to see if their was a way by which > you could tell whether the number is valid BEFORE it is sent to the > bank for processing. Since this solution requires sending the card to > the bank for processing to see if the number is valid, it would defeat the > purpose. > I did read the question. Every question has a context. My response is still valid within the context of his question. There may be mitigating factors, but in the projects I've worked on in the past, the approach I suggested has proved much more reliable in the long-term. John -- John Donagher Application Engineer Intacct Corp. - Powerful Accounting on the Web 408-395-0989 720 University Ave. Los Gatos CA 95032 www.intacct.com Public key available off http://www.keyserver.net Key fingerprint = 4024 DF50 56EE 19A3 258A D628 22DE AD56 EEBE 8DDD